Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

67 Jack Cawcutt and Albert Wallis at this aspect of their trade. Come the day of the funeral, Jack would also don his bowler-hat to precede the bier through the streets and oversee the bearers at church and graveside. Mr Smith was even more versatile than his predecessors: Alan Cockburn, an evacuee from Tollington School (q.v.) billeted with the family, recalled that Mr Smith was not only a builder and undertaker, but also a corn merchant, a coal and coke merchant and an insurance agent – besides being a church warden! The firm was well-known for its church restoration work, Jack Cawcutt being entrusted to undertake whatever required the most skill and experience. Smith’s continued after its founder’s death in 1950; it was finally taken over by Kirton Builders (q.v.) in the early 1970s. soup kitchens , and their predecessors, soup shops , were an occasional feature of Buckden life in hard times. At Christmastide 1799, for example, the then Bishop of Lincoln, George Pretyman, distributed three meals of meat and bread to 225 poor people of the parish; in the following week he distributed 300 quarts of meat and vegetable broth with bread. The Christmas fare cost him twelve guineas, the soup only two. Fifty-six years later, the St. Neots Chronicle reported that on New Year’s Day 1856, the Buckden Soup Kitchen had resumed its twice-weekly distribution of soup. By this time, however, Buckden had no resident bishop and the kitchen was overseen by George Woolley the village doctor, Mr Langley the village’s leading shopkeeper and some of the local gentry, including the Greens of Coneygarths and the Misses Mann. Nor was the soup now free: the grateful poor had to pay a halfpenny a quart. This not being enough to cover the full cost, the balance was made up by a list of subscribers – among whom was Dr Maltby, formerly vicar of Buckden, now Bishop of Durham. The Chronicle pointedly contrasted his generosity with the absence from the list of the vicar of the day, who apparently refused to contribute towards a charity that helped non-conformists as well as Anglicans. Food charity was sometimes also distributed on days of celebration. On the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, for example, Mr and Mrs Marshall not only entertained 850 people to tea at The Towers, but ensured that anyone unable to attend received a ‘substantial meal’ in their own homes; if they were aged, sick or infirm they received a double portion and a gift of tea, sugar and groceries. Any left over food was distributed the next day to 50 or 60 of the village’s poorest families. South, James: see under charities. speed traps: see police trap. Spread Eagle, High Street [MapRef 33]. This Grade II listed building is a former coaching inn. That any of its early architecture survives is surprising, given that much of the property and surrounding area was reported as being destroyed by fire in May 1803 (see under fires and fire-fighting equipment ). What remains is a 17thC cross-wing linked by an archway to the inn proper, which dates from the early 18thC and is notable for its large bay windows flanking the front door. There was a hatch in the underside of the arch through which baggage could be passed up from the roof of a coach to the bedroom corridor on the first floor. A similar arrangement was in place at the Lion (q.v.). In 1840, the Spread (as it was commonly known) was one of fifty inns and public houses included in a two-day sale held in St Neots. The auctioneers’ notice describes the inn as having ‘extensive stabling, a garden, paddocks &c., together with a compact farm of 30 acres, lying at a short distance.’ One of the other lots in the sale may have been the old Falcon (q.v.), which stood a few yards to the north of the Spread. Among the coaches that used the Spread were the Boston, the Leeds Union, and the York Highflyer. A coach driver was in fact one of its landlords in the 1830s. He was the famous George Cartwright (q.v.). His successors included Charles Okins; William Chapman (1840s/1850s); William Worley [q.v.] (1860s to 1880s); Diddington-born David Pratt (1880s/1890s) and by 1898, Peter McLeod (q.v.). By 1901, Mr McLeod was catering for a new type of customer, the touring cyclist, but as might be expected of a former private coachman, he had not entirely abandoned the horse: he hired out flies. In July 1908, the then landlord, Mr Ernest Mann, lost a horse in the inn’s paddock when it was struck on the head by lightning during one of the worst local storms for several years. There was even more excitement in June 1922, when the Spread was the scene of a highway robbery ‘of exceptional audacity’: six men in a large car drove off with a Gladstone bag which a Mr and Mrs Crisp of Letchworth had left strapped to their motorcycle and sidecar when they went inside for a drink. The bag was later recovered from under a hedge – minus £8 in sovereigns. Landlords who came in after the First World War included hairdresser Cecil Sims, and George Edward Brighty. One resident remembers that during the Second World War, Mr Brighty used the well in the backyard as a hiding place for bottles of whisky – or more probably, whiskey, since their provenance was almost certainly some US forces store. The Spread retained its licence until early in the 21stC, when like so many other pubs it succumbed to changing drinking habits. A final attempt to make it viable by giving over one bar to a part-time Thai restaurant did not succeed, and in 2003 the Spread Eagle was closed. It was The Spread Eagle in 1992 David Thomas